Set during the show’s second season, Torchwood: Believe gives fans the full-cast adventure they’ve wanted since Big Finish first produced the range. There’s no Rhys, but we do have Jack, Gwen, Ianto, Owen and Toshiko. It’s a three-disc story from the mighty pen of Guy Adams, directed by Scott Handcock.

What’s it about?

First the product page synopsis:

The Church of the Outsiders believe that mankind is about to evolve, to reach out into the stars. Owen Harper believes that Torchwood has to do whatever it takes to stop them.

It’s certainly concise. The Church of the Outsiders are sinister, obsessed and manipulative. They are also an oblique threat, so Owen believes they should be dealt with, Jack isn’t so certain and very quickly gets taken off-stage giving Owen the chance to lead the team. Across the three discs each of the team has a mission: Gwen to help the daughter of the cult founder, Ianto to join the cult while Owen and Tosh conduct a little espionage.

Guy Adams has taken great pains to make each team member’s thread relevant to the whole, though focusses on the central pairing of Tosh and Owen (as the show did at times). Ianto has some grim experiences inside the cult that will send shivers up the spine, but it’s the depths to which Owen sends Tosh listeners will find most distressing. Full marks to the direction and performances of Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori.

The end of the story is satisfying, Jack is a large part of the solution and Owen learns something about his strengths and weaknesses as a leader. Jack is of course far from perfect (as we are learning in other releases and Gwen has (perhaps) yet to gain the steel she exhibits so well in stories set later. This is all very credible.

It’s a clever piece of writing with some ingenious elements as well as well realised characters.